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Rebels credit Mudar Abu Ali with warning of dangers and alerting fighters to potential targets.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

They call him the Watchtower, although the nickname does not quite fit. He is the eyes and voice not of one man in one place, but of many men scattered across the northern Syrian countryside.

Mudar Abu Ali is his real name, minus his surname, which he said he must withhold to protect his family. Before Syria descended into civil war he was an electrician by trade. Now he is the organizer of one of the many essential functions in an armed guerrilla campaign: He leads a network of spotters in northern Syria who watch roads and military bases, broadcasting warnings about the movement of government forces that the rebels are trying to elude or to kill.

Anyone who has been in the proximity of the rebels in Idlib or Hama Province has probably heard his voice crackling over the ubiquitous two-way radios that opposition fighters carry. It is deep, fast and almost incessant, from early in the morning to night.

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The Voice of the Syrian Watchtower

Mudar Abu Ali is the eyes and voice not of one man in one place, but of many men scattered across the northern Syrian countryside.

Virtually every rebel in the region listens for it; many listen intently, in the way of people whose lives can depend on news. The Watchtower — Burj al-Moraqaba or برج المراقبة in Arabic — has become a real-time narrator of Syrian military movements across a large and unpredictable battlefield.

One day a few weeks back, as he sat for an interview, another man’s voice came crackling over the radio. It was a spotter at a distant airfield, notifying Mudar of helicopters that had just left the base, headed generally northeast. Mudar listened with knowing familiarity, then repeated the essentials.

“Helicopters are heading to the front now,” he said into a keyed microphone, to everyone and no one in particular. “Two helicopters left Hama air base one minute ago.”

For as long as there has been war there have been pickets, sentries, spotters, signalers and runners — those who keep tabs on foes and relay information to fellow fighters and friends. Mudar is the contemporary version of that role in the Syrian civil war now grinding through its third year. He is busy orchestrating the shadows following President Bashar al-Assad’s conventional forces.

Men like Mudar confounded American forces throughout their recent occupation in Iraq, and others still do in Afghanistan, where the steady flow of pro-Taliban spotters fills the air with what soldiers call “Icom chatter.” (Icom is a popular brand of radio that is also favored by Afghan insurgents.)

If such men are loathed by those whose locations they disclose, and are the targets of bounties and late-night raids to silence their voices, Mudar presents an appearance that hardly matches his reputation. He is in his 50s, with a short gray beard that is turning white. He carries no weapon, but like many men in Syria now, he wears a camouflage uniform. His is a desert tan, and is very clean. He strolls down village lanes without attracting special notice.

His smile comes easily, only to fade when his radio bursts with new information. Then his face can become a web of creases as he listens to his friends’ voices on the radio. After briefly formulating his summary, he passes the word.

Mudar and the rebels he helps say he has roughly two dozen men who work for him, each watching a specific place or listening in on captured Syrian military radios and then telling him what they can of Syrian Army and Air Force movements. They also watch base entrances, looking for collaborators from local towns or villages who enter and leave government outposts. His spotters, rebels say, sometimes spot a snitch.

Rebels credit him with warning people of dangers and alerting fighters to potential targets. He attributes accuracy not to himself, but to those who help him. “Everyone is in a specific spot,” he said of his spotters.

His reputation for missing very little was illustrated by how he arranged to be interviewed. Four rebels traveling with journalists inquired in a few villages about Mudar. They drove from place to place, unable to locate him. But he was watching them all the time.

Eventually, Mudar’s voice boomed over the radio on the dashboard of one of the rebel’s cars: “You men in the two white cars driving up the hill right now: stop there and wait.”

A few minutes later an unarmed man wearing a red and white scarf appeared on foot, strolling downhill in an easygoing gait. He looked like any number of aging Syrian men. Then he smiled and spoke; the voice was instantly recognizable.

Mudar gestured to a home and invited his visitors onto its porch. A baby cried inside. (“There is no milk,” the child’s father said.) While Mudar explained his work, he continued to manage intermittent streams of radio traffic.

It was a busy hour, with reports of helicopters circling over one town and the pilot of an attack jet announcing he was above another target. The spotters had overheard these things by monitoring a radio captured from a Syrian Air Force base, Mudar said.

“Men in Sha’the, pay attention: The fighter jet is heading there,” he said into his radio. “Be careful,” he added. “The fighter jet is coming to you.”

In a lull, when his radio was quiet, he said he wondered how a country could be attacked in such ways, by its own military, and not receive more help.

“We are surprised why the world is silent about the massacres. Are the Syrian children a Grade C product?” he asked. “What makes us wonder is that if this happened in Israel, and a child or a woman was killed, what would the international reaction be then?”

He was not expecting a reply. His radio was busy. Mudar returned to work.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and Gen. Nikola Ljuvicic, the Yugoslavian defense secretary, looked at ammunition during a 1973 visit to Valjevo. Analysts across the world were attempting to assess what the colonel was up to as he placed order after order for more weapons at that time.Credit Associated Press

Thirty-eight years ago, a largely forgotten Belgian ambassador serving in Libya sent a secret cable from Tripoli to his home office in Brussels. Now declassified, the contents of the cable, “Libyan Arms from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,” offered one diplomat’s baldly undiplomatic take on a theme common at the time among analysts trying to assess the activities of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi: What was the colonel up to as he placed order after order for more weapons?

This cable was discovered by Damien Spleeters, an independent journalist, in Belgium’s government archives. It does more than offer new insights into Libya’s arms-procurement record. It presents the naked cynicism of the very suppliers of part of Colonel Qaddafi’s lethal bounty. And it suggests that those making the arms deals knew, even 40 years ago, that Libya’s weapons would not be retained by Libya’s government — an observation that in light of the proliferation risks posed by Libya’s stockpiles reads like a starkly reckless position for an arms-dealing nation to take.

In 1975, Colonel Qaddafi was still a relatively new revolutionary leader. Western diplomats knew the background, but were less certain of what it would all mean. Colonel Qaddafi had assumed power in 1969 via a bloodless coup orchestrated by a clique of officers from Libya’s American- and British-backed military. He soon required American and British forces to leave their garrisons on his country’s soil. And he set out, by tapping bank accounts rich from oil revenue, on an arms-buying spree that would make Libya, until then a welterweight, a player on the international stage.

With weapons to share with whichever revolutionaries and terrorists the colonel cared to court, Libya joined much more powerful nations as an arbiter of organized violence, even though its own military was marginally trained and untested outside of its one success at palace intrigue. While this was playing out, the Belgian ambassador in early 1975, Charles Loodts, had a front-row view, as Belgium was among the arms suppliers in the West that eagerly maintained business (read: arms-trading) ties to the Qaddafi government after Libya’s relations with the United States and Britain tanked.

On March 6 of that year, Mr. Loodts sent a classified cable to Belgium’s foreign minister, which noted, near its end, that, “Libyans never fought memorable battles, they mostly celebrate the evacuation of foreign troops (British and American). They don’t like to wage war and prefer to earn a lot of money in a short time.” To that dig, Mr. Loodts added a line that contained a thought as prescient as cables ever get: “An invading foreign army would certainly not encounter much resistance and would also find a very useful on-site arsenal.” Bluntly translated: These guys don’t really need what everyone is selling them, and probably are not inclined to use it. But whoever conquers this place later will make quite a haul.

Mr. Loodts did not foresee the end, at least not precisely. Colonel Qaddafi was deposed not by an invading army but by an internal uprising backed by foreign logistics, air and naval support. And his soldiers and loyalists at times fought fiercely, belying that perennial (and arguably colonialist) knock about non-Westerners being ill-suited for proper war. But Belgium’s ambassador did foresee the result: enormous stores of weapons would be captured, and prove, to borrow Mr. Loodt’s word, “useful” to their new owners.

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Belgian FN F2000 bull-pup assault rifle with grenade launcher, taken from loyalist soldiers in Misurata, Libya in 2011. Credit CJ Chivers/The New York Times

All these decades later, many of the arms purchases that came to characterize the Qaddafi era have been reasonably well mapped, and many of the colonel’s escapades as an arms supplier are broadly understood. These narratives fit the bloody arc of the colonel’s life, which ended at the hands of a crowd of rebels clutching many of the colonel’s own guns. The story can be rendered as an update to the parable: Live by the sword, die by the sword, while causing much suffering along the trail. And the dark postscript — that large parts of the arms stockpiles accumulated during Colonel Qaddafi’s reign are now loose, and turning up in conflicts elsewhere — is equally well accepted, even as it is being documented in real time. The arsenal that Colonel Qaddafi bequeathed to those who toppled him is a black-marketeer’s prize, and moving every which way. But what was less explicitly understood, even if suspected by arms researchers, was the degree to which some of the suppliers of these weapons anticipated that Libya would not be able to use, or even maintain possession of, the weapons it was buying.

This is where Belgium and Mr. Loodts come in, with a voice made possible only through freedom-of-information laws, via two pages of secret correspondence from 1975.

Mr. Loodts’s cable does not change the record, but adds tone and context to it. It was already understood that Belgium showed little public qualms in the 1970s and 1980s about providing weapons to men of Colonel Qaddafi’s stripe. Rather, it had a rich stake. In Brussels and in the offices of Belgium’s arms exporters, Colonel Qaddafi’s arms-stockpiling splurge was less a worry than an opportunity, and in the years that followed Mr. Loodts’s secret chuckle, Belgium expanded sales of conventional munitions and landmines to Libya, a customer that paid its bills and was loading up.

Calculating a precise tally of the Belgium-Libya arms trade is not possible. Libya’s arms-procurement records, to the extent they ever existed, have not surfaced since Col. Qaddafi was killed. And Belgium destroyed many of its export documents from the period, leaving large gaps in what should be a public record. (Mr. Spleeters characterizes the destruction of these records as “illegal.”) But there is no question that the scale of trade was enormous. Not long after Mr. Loodts sent his cable, Belgium approved a license to export more than 4,700 tons of 106-millimeter recoilless rifle antitank projectiles and spare parts to Libya. (These were the same munitions that the New York Times would find this year in Mali and Syria). And in Aug. 1980 Belgium approved the export of 4,600 tons of landmines to Col. Qaddafi’s forces; many of these mines are now also loose.

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The projectile of a Belgian NR-160 106mm recoilless rifle round on the ground in Konne, Mali in February.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Belgium was doing more than shipping huge quantities of munitions to Libya. It was negotiating with Colonel Qaddafi’s government to build an arms manufacturing plant on Libyan soil. That plan failed. But in light of Mr. Loodts’s cable, the synchronized work of arms makers and diplomats emerges as a case of a European state trying to secure a cash flow for quantities of arms that its diplomats knew the recipient nation did not need.

Belgium would keep a hand in arms sales to Libya almost to its end, selling rifles, grenade launchers and ammunition to the colonel’s forces, officially for the defense of humanitarian aid convoys. These weapons would later be turned by Libya’s army and militia against Libyan citizens.

As this blog often notes, weapons are not especially perishable; they tend to last for at least several decades. And many of the Libya’s Belgian-made weapons are now out of state hands, and have moved, according to the United Nations and to journalists who follow these things, to conflicts on several points of the compass, including in Mali, Syria and the Gaza Strip.

Four decades after he wrote it, Mr. Loodts’s cable is more than a reminder of both the power and weakness of open-records laws. It illuminates some of the back-room talk of an arms-dealing state that quietly mocked its own customer, albeit far too late for much to be done. It also provides grounds for arms researchers to wonder what might be seen if government records discussing the steadily brewing embarrassments of latter-day arms movements would be made public, too.

Hassan Aboud and Abu Ayman, two commanders of Islamist fighting units.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

In recent weeks considerable public attention has turned to questions of whether government forces in Syria have used chemical weapons. And all the while, conventional fighting with conventional weapons – the dominant form of violence and source of killing in this and most every war of our time – has continued to rage. As world leaders and commentators of every stripe have debated President Obama’s “red line,” there have been developments on the ground, which might herald tactical shifts and point to the verifiable, actual slog that is the Syrian civil war.

Earlier this year, this blog examined the fight for Minakh Air Base. That battle, now roughly a year old, appears to have taken a nearly decisive shift.

Background

A brief recap: The fighting in Syria was initially lopsided. The Alawite-led government began its crackdown in 2011 with fully equipped police and military forces. The predominantly Sunni opposition had little more than defiance and words; in a military sense, it was barely equipped at all. Throughout 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and militia proxies moved freely through much of the country, building checkpoints, carrying out raids and trying to enforce its will.

By the spring of 2012 this one-sided dynamic had shifted. Opposition fighters had begun to acquire rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. They were also supported by rapidly developing cadres of bomb-makers. Once the resulting ambush and bombing campaign took hold, the Syrian military could no longer patrol large parts of the countryside without risking the loss of equipment and lives. Small government checkpoints and checkpoints that could not be supported by helicopter resupply became untenable. Government forces abruptly curtailed much of their ground movements, opting to concentrate forces in networks of large bases and midsize outposts and roll out their air force, both for logistics and air support. This economy-of-force stance in Idlib and Aleppo governorates meant that the government has largely been unable to move forward in a significant fashion for a year. But many of its bases in the overwhelmingly rebellious northern part of the country have held against the opposition fighters, allowing the government to keep other troops concentrated near Damascus, the capital, and to reinforce its positions in and near the country’s highlands near the Mediterranean coast, from where much of its ruling clique hails.

The government’s hardened positions near Idlib and Aleppo quickly assumed a lethal character. Often equipped with artillery or multiple rocket launchers, they became a means of collective punishment. From behind bunker lines or walls, Syrian army units settled into the tactic of shelling the surrounding villages and towns, harassing rebel units, terrifying civilian residents and driving large fractions of the population away.

Minakh Air Base was one of these bases, and the last sizable government position in northern Aleppo governorate. It was cut off from other army units but for months had been kept tenuously resupplied by Syrian Air Force helicopters. And as Minakh’s forces grew weaker – via defections, attrition and dwindling resupply – the base remained dangerous. Surrounded by opposition fighters from several armed groups, its days long ago seemed numbered, although its occupants have fought fiercely to keep the rebels from overrunning its outer walls. It has been the scene of a classically ugly siege.

Recent Developments

By early May, according to several activists and one commander, the government forces at Minakh neared collapse. A group of government pilots, following a plot line hinting at the agonizing pressures of a government disintegrating in a civil war, killed a general leading the forces inside the base. The group then staged a mass defection, according to the commander in the North Storm brigade, who goes by Abu Thabet, an alias. Simultaneously, rebels said, their armed groups were breaching the base and taking positions within.

When the likely day comes that these air fields are overrun, both Abu ad Duhur and Minakh Air Base will yield insights into the war and the state of the Syrian armed forces. Abu Thabet said interviews with the defected pilots from Minakh have provided new information about the surviving government forces’ desperate conditions. He estimated that about 200 soldiers and loyalist militiamen remain on Minakh, and retain control of the air base’s main building and main gate, along with a contingent of tanks, which makes them tactically difficult to unseat. Though they may still be capable of killing rebels who get near, they have little food and scant hope, Abu Thabet said. Barring a major operation by the Syrian military to relieve them, they are utterly cut off. Their base has become their trap. Some of the soldiers, he said, now live in trenches and under the tanks, waiting for a final assault.

Now the rub. Should the base fall from government hands, one likely result would be intensified fighting elsewhere. This is because when opposition fighters overpower and capture a base, a bloody dynamic typically follows – rebel groups that have been clustered around the base, often for months, are freed up for fighting elsewhere. Similarly, the Syrian Air Force has one less base to protect with air support, which allows its limited fleet to shift to other missions. This can lead to more fighting and bloodshed a short drive away.

And in northern Syria, the government has retained several strong points in the face of rebel gains. Two of the most important have been a pair of mutually supporting positions between Ariha and Saraqib known almost universally in the area as the “Brick Factory” and the “Youth Camp,” names derived from each position’s prewar use. These two positions are in the lowlands at the foot of the Jebel al-Zawiya range, the mountainous area of the Idlib countryside, and virtually astride one of the four-lane highways that crisscross the region. The screen grab of a satellite image, below, from www.wikimapia.com shows the Brick Factory; the camp is just to its east.

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The brick factory is one of the most loathed positions in the area; from here the government troops routinely shell the surrounding Sunni villages. This place, simply put, kills and terrifies local people. The boom of its artillery is a frequent sound. Many residents visibly flinch when they hear the outgoing rounds, wondering where the shells will land. A view of the next image, below, shows one of the reasons the position has survived so long: the surrounding ground is thinly vegetated with olive groves, making an undetected approach difficult.

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The photo, below, of the outskirts of the youth camp, shows its Ferris wheels in the distance and gives a sense of spacing between olive trees; this kind of terrain offers little in the way of cover or concealment for fighters approaching on foot.

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Credit C.J. Chivers

The two positions, the old factory and the old camp, are also close enough that they can support each other by indirect fire, meaning that rebel movements against either camp can expose the opposition fighters to a crescendo of dropping artillery and mortar rounds. And when rebels get close, they can face direct fire from the armor and machine guns within. The two outposts also are within range of artillery from Ariha, where the Syrian Army still occupies multiple strong points, and where the rebels have been unable to establish a secure foothold. (Activists said that this is because of the lingering presence of pro-regime informants and spies.)

Taken together, these many interlocking positions were the source of much of the killing documented in the region last September by Amnesty International. Their endurance points to the difficulties rebel units face as they contemplate assaults on the much stronger government garrisons in the city of Idlib proper, including the imbalances in the two sides’ weapons, which pit rebels with shoulder-fired arms, light mortars and workshop-grade rockets against government units equipped with the tools of an armored brigade.

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Hassan Aboud and Abu Ayman, two commanders of Islamist fighting units, were focused on the battle for the Taftanaz air base until January.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Earlier this year, two Islamist commanders, shown above, who lead the opposition forces against the factory and the camp, sat for interviews. The commanders, Hassan Aboud of Soquor al-Sham and Abu Ayman of Ahrar al-Sham, described an incremental approach, made necessary in part by their scant supply of powerful weapons. They said that for months they had not concentrated forces against the factory and the camp because they had helped in the battle for Taftanaz air base, a priority until rebels captured it in January. Now they had another goal.

“The governments camps here and there were receiving support from that air base,” said Abu Ayman. “But now we are attacking these camps where the regime soldiers are gathered and from where they shell the villages.”

The hardships of the rebels’ lot, and the difficult logistical circumstances, were written on these men’s bodies. Abu Ayman was missing the three middle fingers on his left hand. Mr. Aboud’s lower legs were gone. Both men had sustained injuries related to relying on makeshift weapons. Abu Ayman’s hand had been mutilated when he was manufacturing and examining pipe-bomb hand grenades last November for the battle for Taftanaz. (“The fuze was not working and I was disassembling it to fix it when it exploded,” he said.) Mr. Aboud had been gravely wounded when he was helping to load a workshop-grade rocket last fall and it exploded prematurely. (“Now we have improved the rockets,” he said. “More safe. More effective. Bigger.”)

Abu Ayman also made a point that is germane to the continuing discussion about whether chemical weapons have been used in the war. Like the Amnesty International report, he noted that the killing in Syria has mostly been done by the government, and often by heavily equipped military forces against civilians who have no means of fighting back or whose defense has been taken up by lightly equipped armed opposition groups. The Obama administration’s emphasis on chemical weapons use as a “red line,” he offered, was a position with little moral force, and that lacked a contextual understanding of the war.

“America might make such a red line if in Syria we had two armies fighting each other,” he said. “But in our case we have an army killing its people. An army, and a people. Even the bullets – one single bullet – should have been a red line.”

The Syrian Army unit at the Brick Factory, the people in Idlib know, has killed far more people than any of the purported chemical attacks. And that is one of the reasons the commanders inside are involved in tactical matters, even the slight shifts of a painful and slowly moving civil war, like those around the government’s remaining outposts. These are the places and the battles, where lives and the local villages’ safety, are in the balance.

What appear to be M60 recoilless guns in Syrian videos posted to Youtube.Credit

The use of social media by opposition groups and activists in Syria has allowed those of us who follow these sources carefully to pursue a different form of insight into conflict reporting than had been possible before the time when opposition fighters reflexively videotaped their operations and posted them online. With hundreds of videos showing the activities of fighting groups now posted on YouTube each day, external analysts have been allowed to build a picture of events in Syria that in past wars have gone unrecorded. These videos, often shared via Twitter and Facebook, allowed analysts and arms spotters in 2012 to track almost in real time the escalation in the conflict on both sides, including the use of cluster bombs and incendiary bombs, as well as potential war crimes committed by the government and the opposition alike.

YouTube has also been instrumental in allowing analysts to follow certain arming trends, including the arrival of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles to rebel possession last year and the influx in 2013 of weapons previously unseen in the conflict. This in turn provides an opportunity for traditional investigation. In short, during the past several weeks scores of videos have been uploaded to YouTube that provide evidence of a seemingly distinct flow of new weapons to the country, which The New York Times has now identified as a Saudi-financed flow of arms from Croatia.

I first noticed arms heretofore unseen in Syria when two videos taken from Syrian state television were uploaded to channels sympathetic with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, showing weapons seized from the Syrian opposition. The first video showed large quantities of weapons reportedly seized by government forces in Dara’a in southwest Syria, just north of the border with Jordan. It claimed to show Israeli-made weapons, four antiaircraft weapons and an antiaircraft cannon.

The second video shows a smaller collection of weapons taken from a group of opposition fighters killed by the Syrian military in near Sad al Roum, Suwayda, near Dara’a.

It is not unusual for Syrian state television to show collections of weapons taken from opposition fighters, but what is unusual are the weapons captured. In the first video we see four different weapons, and ammunition for those weapons. First, we have the M79 Osa.

The M79 Osa is an antitank weapon originating from the former Yugoslavia. Rather unusually the rockets come in separate pods that are attached to the rear of the rocket launcher. Dozens were present in the first video, and two in the second. Markings visible on rocket pods in both videos indicate that they were manufactured between 1990 and 1991.

We then have the M60 recoil-less gun, seen on the far left of the picture, below left, alongside dozens of M79 Osa rocket pods. Again, the M60 is a weapon originating in the former Yugoslavia and has continued to be used in Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia since Yugoslavia’s breakup.

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The M60 recoil-less gun, seen on the far left of the picture at left. At right, RPG-22s.Credit

Also pictured, at right, are a large number of RPG-22s. RPG-22s are one-shot disposable antitank weapons, originating in the Soviet Union and used by a number of countries, including Croatia.

The RBG-6 is a reproduction of the South African Milkor MGL Mk-1 40-millimeter semiautomatic grenade launcher, made in Croatia.

What is interesting about these weapons is none of them are used by the Syrian military, and, apart from small numbers of RPG-22s, none had been used before by the Syrian opposition. While Syrian state television could never be considered a reliable source of information, it seemed extremely unlikely that weapons had been shipped in from the former Yugoslavia for propaganda purposes, especially in the huge quantities shown in the first video, when ample weapons are available inside Syria for such purposes.

Both videos purposed to show weapons captured by government forces in the Dara’a-Suwayda region. So I went back and examined the videos uploaded to YouTube by armed opposition groups in that region. All four of the weapons not only appear in a large number of videos from that region, but also appeared to play a significant role in one particular opposition offensive.

At the start of January, a number of opposition groups operating in the Dara’a region joined together and attacked Syrian government forces in the town of Busr al Harir, nearly 16 miles northwest of the city of Dara’a. These combined forces, including the well-established Omari Brigade and other smaller groups, were all armed with the weapons pictured above. Opposition groups in this area, it seemed, appeared to have received a sizable quantity of weapons from sources outside Syria. In January, more than 60 videos were posted from groups fighting in this location showing the four different weapons, as well as videos showing multiple destroyed armored vehicles and heavy fighting.

As I looked further, I found that this was not the only place where these new weapons had appeared. In the second half of January, videos began appearing showing the Ababil Horan Brigade, which had been operating in and around Damascus for several months, using the M60 recoil-less gun to attack Syrian forces inside Aqraba, in the southeast suburbs of Damascus. This was followed in February with videos of fighting in the southern Damascus suburb of Al Qadam showing the Ababil Horan Brigade with the RBG-6 grenade launcher and M79 Osa rocket launcher.

On Feb. 8, another group fighting in Damascus, the Abdullah bin Masood Brigade, posted this video showing them fighting in the Yarmouk Camp area of Damascus, in which they state they had joined the Ababil Horan Brigade, and seems to demonstrate the growing power and influence these new weapons give to the groups that control them. Other groups in Damascus have now been seen with these weapons, including the Daraya Martyrs Brigade using a RBG-6 grenade launcher.

All across the region between Dara’a and Damascus, there were an increasing number of videos showing these weapons’ being used by a number of armed opposition groups. This video from Feb. 12 shows an M60 recoil-less gun operator being killed near Deir al Bakht, between Damascus and Dara’a, and this video shows a M60 recoil-less gun being used on the same day near El Sahoah, east of Dara’a. These videos document how widespread the use of Yugoslav weapons had become. A video posted on Feb. 13 shows a classroom of fighters, described as being from the Free Syrian Army, being taught how to use these new weapons by instructors from the Farouq Brigade, in a seminar organized by the Free Syrian Army’s Dara’a-based Dawn of Islam Brigade. The new weapons, it seemed, are being incorporated into the opposition’s training.

By the time the weapons had spread beyond the fighting for Daraa and Damascus. Videos from the Hama, Idlib and Aleppo regions have shown these weapons in use from late January onward. Two of the most interesting videos from Aleppo show a M79 Osa rocket launcher in the hands of Col. Abdul-Jabber Mohammed Aqidi, reportedly the former commander of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo Province. Colonel Aqidi is now part of the recently formed Supreme Military Council, acting as one of six representatives for the Northern Front, and, maybe more telling, one of two members of the armament committee for the Northern Front, with these videos being one of a series from his recent visit to opposition forces in Aleppo.

While videos of these weapons being used in the Aleppo region are still quite rare, their use in Hama and Idlib appear to have coincided with a number of major clashes in those regions. In this video from the recent clashes in Kernaz, Hama, we see a number of rocket launchers, including the RPG-22 and M79 Osa. In the major battle at Wadi Dief military base, just southwest of Maart al-Numan, Idlib (not far from the Hama provincial border), involving a large number of opposition fighters from various opposition groups, including Jihadists and the Free Syrian Army, photographs and videos from the area have shown the opposition using RPG-22s, M79 Osas, and at least one M60 recoil-less gun.

There’s a number of interesting things about these weapons. First, it appears these weapons are only going to moderate groups with links to the Free Syrian Army, and not to Jihadist and Salafist groups such as Al Nusra Front, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization. Second, the presence of the newly arrived Yugoslav weapons across the entire length of the country to the north suggests the possibility of two supply lines providing these weapons – one from Jordan and another perhaps from Turkey. Finally, these weapons offer a degree of control to those supplying them. The M79 Osa and M60 recoil-less gun both fire projectiles not common in the region, and the RPG-22 is a one-shot disposable weapon. This means that if the supplier cuts off ammunition supply the weapons become less menacing — an ideal circumstance for anyone who hopes to make limit their spread beyond Syria’s current war.

Eliot Higgins is the creator of the Brown Moses Blog, where he examines the arms and munitions used in the Syrian conflict. Follow him on Twitter: @Brown_Moses

Since late last spring, when fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad began pushing government security forces out of parts of northern Syria, one military compound north of Aleppo has been a stubborn holdout: the air base at Minakh.

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A Google satellite image of Minakh air base and the town to its east, both located several miles south of Azaz.Credit WikiMapia

In town after town last year, Mr. Assad’s troops gave way to a campaign of ambushes, hit-and-run attacks and roadside bombs, ultimately pulling back into strong points and cities to fight a slower and more stationary war. The rebels then chipped away at outlying outposts, treating each as an island and overrunning many of them as the months have passed. The isolated base at Minakh has proved to be insurmountable.

Located on flatlands and ringed by wheat and potato fields that offer little cover or concealment, the base and the village at its eastern side have even been nigh unapproachable. To venture near has been to risk machine-gun and rifle fire, as well as high-explosive ordnance from armored vehicles and tanks or an attack from one of the patrolling aircraft that serve as the lifeline for entrapped soldiers within.

The rebels hope to change that this winter. In recent weeks they have rejoined the battle for Minakh with greater intensity, driven in part by a sense that the government garrison on the base – thinned by casualties and defections – is significantly weaker than what it was.

The invigorated effort is also tied to the desire to finish the battle so that the Free Syrian Army can release rebel units for battles elsewhere, just as the capture of the Taftanaz air base in Idlib Province this month gave rebels more flexibility to amass their fighters or prepare for future fights.

This video, posted online on Jan. 10, shows a Syrian helicopter bombing the Taftanaz air base, where activists said rebels were gaining an upper hand.

The contest for Minakh is perilous, and the rebels’ success at Taftanaz has cut both ways, because now that the government does not need to defend that airfield it can shift more attack aircraft to sorties to Minakh and the surrounding towns, where rebels have clustered for the fight. The nearest city, Azaz, has been hit several times this month, including over the weekend, when it was reportedly subjected to a cluster-munitions attack. As has been common in government attacks in the northern Aleppo countryside, these attacks have been indiscriminate, and killed civilians.

At the front lines, the intensified fighting has also claimed one prominent and busy rebel commander. Amar al-Dadikhi, who leads the North Storm brigade, was severely wounded in the middle of January. He is being treated for his wounds in Turkey, where, according to several of his friends and to fighters under his command, one of his legs was amputated. (His wounds further complicate the fates of the nine remaining Lebanese hostages that Mr. Dadikhi has held since last May.

Mr. Dadikhi insists, although he has not publicly provided evidence, that his hostages are members of Hezbollah, which supports Mr. Assad in the war. He has said he will release them in a prisoner exchange (as he is now out of commission, their status is even more uncertain.)

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Lebanese Captives in Syria Speak Out

C.J. Chivers, a correspondent for The New York Times, spoke with two Lebanese men held captive in Syria for seven months. Syrian rebels accuse them and seven others of being members of Hezbollah.

On the rebels’ side, the battle in recent weeks has been led in part by a young former Syrian Air Force pilot, who uses the name Abu Marwan. In a recent interview, Abu Marwan, 25, said that rebels had concentrated fighters near the base from several local cities and towns, and said that their pressure against the airstrip has limited the government’s ability to resupply the base or ferry in reinforcements. Medical evacuation flights, he said, are uncommon, and Syrian Air Force helicopter pilots take great risks for even these.

“Every day their number becomes less,” he said of the soldiers inside. “We think there are less than 300 of them left.”

Abu Marwan said the remaining soldiers faced shortages of ammunition for their tanks and artillery and, to conserve their remaining stock, do not fire out as often as they once did. He added that the government’s cartridge supply has held up, in part because the soldiers had stockpiled machine-gun ammunition last year, during the period when roads were still open to government convoys, and resupply flights were more common.

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This is an interesting observation. Last summer, when The New York Times was at the edge of the edge of the air base, Mi-8 flights into the base were a daily occurrence. The aircraft flew high, remaining above the range of rebel heavy machine-guns, and then descended in a steep spiral onto the base. Now that rebels have massed more fighters near the base and have more machine guns and, they say, a few heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles, these flights are far less common. The sound of Mi-8 rotors is rare. The attrition of the government’s helicopter fleet is also likely to be a factor in the decreased rotary-wing support – and another reason the government’s grip on the base is weakening.

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Soldiers who have recently defected, Abu Marwan said, have pointed to one of the effects of the decreased logistical support: the garrison’s food supply is running short. “They said food had become a problem,” he said. “The army gives them dry rice or wheat, and tells the soldiers to make what they can from it.”

There were signs as well of low morale, as might be expected at an isolated and surrounded garrison that is struggling through the winter. “We’ve been told that sometimes the soldiers inside wound themselves just so they can get away from the battle,” Abu Marwan said.

The fighters of the North Stream brigade expressed confidence that they will claim the airfield this winter. But such predictions are difficult to assess. In the summer the rebels announced a large offensive to seize the base, only to call it off not long after it began.

Further, the rebels have often fought rationally and with caution, trying to avoid full-scale or foolish assaults and settling in for the tactics of the siege. These are evident at Minakh, where fighters said they have ringed the base with snipers, sometimes attack by mortars and homemade rockets and then follow-up with entreaties by loudspeaker, urging the surrounded government soldiers, marooned in their own nation, to surrender or defect.

The bodies lay pell-mell under sticky, red earth at Al Islamiah, a sprawling cemetery in Aleppo. Here and there, a limb or a strip of clothing was visible: the tip of a rubber sandal, a clump of curled-up toes, shoeless feet in blue socks. And then there was the face: a prominent nose, a half-open mouth framed by gray stubble, eyes covered with a blindfold. Whatever had happened to the others, there seemed little doubt as to how this man had met his end.

Jan. 9 had been a grim day. Just an hour earlier I had watched outside a tiny clinic as victims of a rocket attack, all civilians, had been rushed in. Bleeding and burned, some already past care, others within a blink of death, they had arrived in taxis and minivans and on the dirty beds of vegetable trucks, as there are few ambulances left in the rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo. At some point, I realized that I had gotten blood on my boots and told my Syrian guide it was time to leave. A quiet cemetery had seemed like a good place to end a depressing day.

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How the 12 bodies ended up in the Aleppo cemetery will probably remain a mystery.Credit Jari Lindholm

But death doesn’t relent quite so easily in Aleppo. At the front gate of the wind-swept cemetery, we were met by a gravedigger who wanted to show us something. And so we discovered the bodies. There were 12 in all, the gravedigger told me; apparently dumped on the grounds overnight, they had been hastily covered in upturned topsoil in an area roughly 5 meters by 5 meters. Nearby lay a handful of 7.62-millimeter shell casings, possibly from an AK-47 assault rifle.Read more…

These two videos (in order) are freshly moving online. The first shows a Syrian Air Force helicopter of the Mi-8 line clearly being hit by a fast-moving projectile as it makes its way through a slow left turn.

The second video shows what appears to be the same aircraft in an almost controlled descent, but burning, before it crashes on level ground. The footage was taken in Aleppo.

What can’t be readily determined is the precise type of missile. The aircraft appears to be well beyond the range of a rocket-propelled grenade, and the plume of burning propellant is much thicker than the trail left by such weapons. The natural suspect would be an SA-7 MANPADS, but any analysis suggesting that is fairly crude, as that weapon’s place at the top of the likely list is due only to the fact that the SA-7, with gripstock, has been the complete system most commonly seen thus far in the conflict.

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An image from a video posted on YouTube that appears to show a Syrian military helicopter being shot down with a surface-to-air missile.Credit

No doubt like many MANPADS watchers this morning, Matthew Schroeder, who covers missile proliferation at the Federation of American Scientists has been examining the videos. He said by telephone that what is shown “certainly could be a MANPADs.” But he added he would have greater confidence if there was video of the weapon actually being fired.
This points to what is needed now to speak with more authority: Patience.

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The New York Times is tracking the human toll of the conflict in this feature.

With time, perhaps only minutes or hours, more videos should appear. If the pattern holds, then various groups will take credit for this downing. Watch closely, should these videos appear, and take note of what weapons the fighters in the videos will be holding, and whether the firing point is shown.

Meanwhile, context: This moment was a long time coming, and so is unsurprising. The ground-to-air war (and the likely regime retaliation for this hit) can be expected to be bloodier from here. Remember the strike in Azaz after the jet downing this summer?

We’ll have more soon, as surface-to-air missile proliferation has become almost its own beat. (For background, try here or here, for starters.)

Throughout this year, as fighting intensified in Syria and antigovernment fighters grew in numbers and in strength, it had seemed inevitable that they would acquire heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles and turn them against the Syrian military aircraft.

Two videos recently posted on YouTube suggest that what had been expected is now occurring.

The first video, embedded below and posted today, shows what would appear to be a two-man hunter-killer team with an SA-7, waiting for an aircraft from hiding behind a building. Matthew Schroeder, an analyst who covers missile proliferation and the arms trade at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, noted “the glint of the missile’s seeker head, so the missile is in the tube.” This, along with the visible battery and grip stock, indicates that the system is complete.The man with the SA-7 does not loiter; he is soon picked up by another man on a light motorcycle.

The second video shows what appears to be a weapon of the same class being fired at a passing fixed-wing jet. The video is not perfect. And it is not possible in the jerky and grainy video to determine which type of missile is in use, but at about 2:02 its audio seems to capture the sound of a missile’s launching and then shows the telltale corkscrew signature of the weapon through the air.

The missile appears to miss and – from here things become less clear – it is possible that the video shows lingering flares from the area where the missile traveled in flight. This might be the signature of a countermeasure system in the targeted aircraft, which dumped the flares to confuse and thwart the missile’s seeker head.

Mr. Spleeters has set up and maintains a map of sightings of man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads (to use the security world’s clunky acronym) in Syria. This has become something of an Internet trap line for missile sightings, and a reader that Mr. Spleeters does not know, Mads Dahl (@massdall), alerted him to these new videos.

The videos have not been verified. Their contents cannot be readily confirmed. But they do appear authentic and to show what analysts have expected to see for some time: evidence of Manpads in use by Syria’s rebels.

A few points of context can help decipher what the sightings might mean.

First, the SA-7 is an old system. Many commentators tend to say that because it is old, its battery might lack adequate charge to activate the system, acquire a target and initiate the launching. In other words, old SA-7s might not fire. That may be so, but there is ample evidence that many old SA-7s do in fact fire, as was seen last year in Libya, where SA-7s from the 1980s were captured by fighters opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and fired several times.

While battery life is an issue worth considering, a more relevant issue for the conflict might be the capabilities of the weapon. The SA-7 is an early Soviet entrant into the Manpads field. It is a dated system, it can be employed from a narrower engagement window than a more up-to-date system, and it is vulnerable to countermeasures. These systems are generally regarded as being less effective against modern military jets than they are against helicopters, or, for that matter, civilian aircraft.

The above reasons are among many reasons why aviation security circles worry intensely over the potential spread of SA-7s from any nation that holds them, and why many Western countries have encouraged militaries to consider destroying the old stock. After all, what value to a modern state is a weapon that has limited utility in war, but could be a terrible weapon for a terrorist or inexperienced guerrilla who turns an SA-7 toward a lumbering passenger jet?

Second, Manpads are not the only means of bringing down aircraft. Many heavy machine guns were designed for this purpose, and can work well against lower-elevation targets, as has been seen at the Abu Ad Duhur air base and in this video, which shows, at 0:22, a helicopter assuming the glide path of a pallet of cement blocks after apparently being struck on a rotor by a machine-gun round.

Fighting for Idlib

In an article published in The New York Times on Thursday, C.J. Chivers (@cjchivers) wrote about the battle for Abu ad Duhur, an air base south of Aleppo, Syria. Rebels have targeted the base to keep its planes from going out on missions. Rebel forces have been trying for months — at times claiming success — to shoot down government planes and helicopters in midflight.

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The tail section of a Syrian Air Force jet downed by the rebels near the Abu ad Duhur Air Base.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

They have downed at least two of the base’s MIG attack jets. And this month they have realized results few would have thought possible. Having seized ground near the base’s western edge, from where they can fire onto two runways, they have forced the Syrian Air Force to cease flights to and from this place.

“We are facing aircraft and shooting down aircraft with captured weapons,” said Jamal Marouf, a commander credited by the fighters with downing the first MIG-21 here. “With these weapons we are preventing aircraft from landing or taking off.”

This is a significant setback for the government in the northern region, where rebels had already strengthened their position with homemade bombs, making roads too perilous for military vehicles to pass and restricting the military’s movements.

On Wednesday, At War dove deeper into the underground industry in one part of Syria that this year has been producing improvised weapons for fighting groups seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. That post focused on a machine-gun turrets and an artillery piece, known as Dadool, both of which were designed and made in Tal Rifaat, a small city north of Aleppo.

This arms production suggests a mix of determination and a scarce supply of powerful weapons, as people do not naturally engage in making weapons when they are otherwise available. Today we continue the line of reporting, examining local mortar and rocket production, and then discuss the messages implicit in this endeavor.

Mustafa’s Mortars and Ammunition

Dadool was an example of a complicated weapon, both to manufacture and to fire. A simpler solution has come from the same collective of workshops, evident in the makeshift mortar at the top of this post, and again, below.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

The photograph shows a shorter pipe mounted on a basic metal frame that can be adjusted for elevation through the frame’s front leg. Mustafa, one of the men who made this weapon, said he had a few others like it and that his weapons had been used in the battle for Azaz, in which the antigovernment fighters drove away the army earlier this summer. (Like Badr in the first post, Mustafa asked that his surname be withheld on security grounds.)

Don’t think of this as a mortar you might see in traditional military use. It’s designed to be fired by line of sight. Even a cursory examination shows that this weapon has a relatively short range, and certainly shorter than Dadool’s; the lightweight frame and the absence of a baseplate to absorb and distribute the energy of a round being fired make that clear. For those who follow this blog or makeshift indirect fire weapons generally, the specimen fits squarely into guerrilla and insurgent convention. Design points here will echo others seen elsewhere, including some of the simple rocket launchers covered in a previous post from Libya last year.

But once again, what is most interesting here is not the mortar tube or its frame. It is the ammunition. After he arrived by pickup truck to display his tube, Mustafa produced two different samples of the rounds the mortar fires. And Badr, who was also present, displayed yet another. One of them is shown below.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

These munitions smack of ambition. Modern mortar rounds are typically propelled through a design that would not be easy to replicate in a shop. In the common factory-grade design, a small initiating charge is contained in the round’s tail boom, between the fins, in the stem extending to the explosive shell. This small charge, as it burns at near-explosive speeds, vents through a series of holes, and the resulting heat and expanding gas force the round up and out the barrel. That said, the small initiating charge, relative to a round’s overall weight, is sufficient for only the shortest ranges. Factory-made mortar rounds thus have an added feature that extend their uses beyond the immediate line of sight. They usually come with incremental charges attached to the tail, in small bags or small plastic doughnut-like sleeves. These are ignited by the flash of the initiating charge. They push the round out at greater speeds, to greater range.

Watch the video below, and you’ll see two more mortar rounds, including one with the radial holes in the shaft of the round.

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Mortars in Tal Rifaat

Without a steady supply of smuggled arms, the Syria rebels are resorting to making their own weapons including simple mortars.

Like the scored rings on the 62-millimeter projectiles fired by Dadool, intended to give those projectiles in-flight spin, the details in these mortar rounds suggest that those behind this ammunition have studied weapons closely, and have tried to mimic details on munitions produced by modern factories. But there is something much deeper, and it is evident in the photograph below. The image shows to fin assemblies (absent the initiating charge) for the mortars assembled in Tal Rifaat.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

Like the fuze body for Dadool’s projectiles, these fins and stems were made by aluminum casting, then refined by basic machining. If they look a little rough, so be it. They appear well-conceived for short-range work, and in any event dressing up a product that is going to be exploded not long after you make it is hardly necessary. What’s interesting here is that these components suggest extensive social engagement. This is because products like these are not the work of one man, or even one shop. All manner of tradesmen are collaborating here. Mustafa said as much, indirectly. It had recently been difficult to produce mortar rounds, he said, because the metal shop that did the aluminum casting for the final assembly is in Aleppo, and the ongoing battle there had disrupted the shop’s production.

Put in the language of business, this wartime industry has a scattered supply chain, and one of the subcontractors was, because of local circumstances, unable to manufacture and ship one of the final products’ parts. A quick tactical mind might say that this is a result of the Syrian military’s action, underscoring the utility and a short-term success in the government’s campaign in the Aleppo governorate, which has certainly been disruptive.

Back up and another picture emerges. The larger lesson might be that what the government’s action achieved this year has been the opposite of what the government desired. Rather than breaking a relatively weak and almost unarmed opposition, it has fueled the creation of a complex and collaborative arms-production sector – in the very neighborhoods where the government hoped the uprisings would be quelled. The weapons described thus far make that point all but self-evident.

Ahmed Turki’s Rockets

The last weapon for our purposes here is, like the improvised explosive devices that have become common to the conflict in Syria, a weapon already deeply entwined in the region’s martial history: the makeshift rocket. Whatever label you prefer for the various antigovernment groups in the Middle East – guerrillas, insurgents, terrorists, revolutionaries – many of the groups, no matter their nationality or sect, have used locally made rockets and rocket launchers in their campaigns. It was an easy prediction that such weapons would turn up in Syria, as they have.

In Tal Rifaat, much of their production is under the hand of Ahmed Turki, a sort of jack-of-all-trades (Mr. Turki is also adept at bringing Internet to buildings without service in rebel-held areas) who has organized several tradesmen into a scattered manufacturing pipeline. Mr. Turki and his friends said that through August he had made more than 200 rockets in more than a half dozen shapes and sizes.

There is more to this type of project than might appear. In addition to making the explosives for rocket warheads, the rebels also manufacture the propellant that sends the weapons into flight. This is an entirely separate process. And when it all has been brought together in the shape of a rocket, Mr. Turki leads firing tests to try to assess the rocket’s reliability, range and trajectory.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

Mr. Turki’s first rockets – the prototypes – were just less than 16 inches long. One of the discarded early specimens is above. His latest are nearly 7 feet long. The range of his most successful have reached, he said, up to three kilometers. These days his tests are fairly easy to organize; he simply sets the rockets up and fires them. But he began the tests about eight months ago, before the Free Syrian Army controlled any territory. Then any practice or experimental shots were dangerous, requiring rockets to be moved through territory that was patrolled or watched over by the army and loyalist militias. His videos from that time show rockets being fired quickly, and then a scramble by the testers to retrieve the rails and disperse before the army could react. The video below shows one such test, complete with a rocket that did not appear to fire, at last launched, and then, amid the group’s jubilation, the realization that they best collect their launch rail quickly and flee.

Homemade Rocket Test

The video shows that the project has had to overcome technical difficulties as well as security risks. Mr. Turki gave two other examples.

On one occasion, a propellant test near the Turkish border, the testers pointed their prototype toward Turkey. Their charge that day included what they thought was a small amount of propellant that would push the projectile perhaps 500 yards. The rocket roared off with a violent whoosh, and sailed into Turkey, he said. (It had no explosive warhead, and Mr. Turki said they searched the other side of the border and never found it.)

On another occasion, Mr. Turki and a group of other arms makers were trying out a new rocket in an olive grove. Firing rockets is a tricky business. The first moment of the propellant’s burn is essential, as it must take the rocket from a standstill and lift it to flight. If there is inadequate propulsion initially, the rocket can lift hesitatingly, which is potentially dangerous, because the weapon can lose its heading, or worse, skip off the ground or be deflected by an obstacle. And if the propellant then ignites at a faster rate, the weapon, already misdirected, can zoom off on an unintended heading. This is what happened on this day, Mr. Turki said. The rocket skipped out a short distance, struck the soil, and spun around just as the propellant’s burn accelerated. It then rushed at the testers, low to ground, narrowly missing one man’s head as he ran away. The man was smoking a cigarette. Mr. Turki remembers his distressed question after it narrowly missed. “Is it a heat seeker?”

What the Weapons Say

Mr. Turki is hardly the only man who has organized the manufacture of such weapons, and Tal Rifaat is not the only locale where they are made either. There are many examples. A recently posted video shows another fighting group with a five-rail improvised rocket launcher (though only four rockets were fired in this sequence). And there is this video of a larger rocket on a single rail. Or this weapon, apparently roughly modeled after a recoilless gun. Or this of a modular zip gun that can fire, albeit slowly, and with nothing that could be described as aiming, various rifle and pistol rounds, or a shotgun shell.

Now look beyond these battlefield curiosities for what they are really trying to tell you. This trade is important for many reasons. Having fielded arms that borrow from the work of Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans or Lebanese fighters for Hezbollah, it suggests the busy cross-pollination of Middle Eastern insurgencies and uprisings. But this martial craftsmanship also speaks to something larger than regional tides. An important element is local and national. When tradesmen and businessmen organize to the degree that Syrian antigovernment fighters have organized, they indicate the depth of popular anger and the extent of a population’s commitment to the fighters’ cause.

And that leads back to one of this blog’s regular points. It’s quite easy, when gazing upon such weapons, to miss the point of their existence. As interesting as these are, makeshift rockets and mortars do not win wars. Nor do zip guns, or even zip guns in modular form. These weapons are likely transitional. They mark a phase. If the day comes when Syrians storm the country’s presidential suite, most of the fighters won’t be carrying homemade firearms, just as they won’t be carrying pitchforks and rakes. They will be carrying assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. What the makeshift weapons really speak to is the degree of organized commitment of many people seeking to topple the current government in Damascus.

Why? Because the manufacture of the weapons shown in this post is a dangerous and difficult craft. In ordinary times, ordinary men would not come together for this kind of project. It defies good sense to brew explosives from industrial or agricultural precursors, much less to assemble remote detonation systems on your work bench or in your home, or to pack pipe bombs and fuzes that you and your neighbors will fire through a steel cylinder at positions occupied by a conventional army. Even testing these weapons carries risks, as evident not just in Mr. Turki’s account of the errant rocket’s boomerang course but in Badr’s 20-meter long lanyard.

What’s more, the physical risks are only part of the obstacle to this kind of underground industry taking shape. The social barriers are significant, too. To reach this point, many tradesmen have to set aside time and energy and form their own intellectual and material collective. And so the technical merits of these weapons, and their origins, point to the human side. Like the cartoon below, the very existence and aspiring complexity of these weapons all but announce that many people stand behind the fighters. This is an insurgency that has matured.

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Political cartoon by Habib Haddad of the Alhayat newspaper. First appeared on Aug. 5, 2011.Credit Alhayat

Where this heads is not fully clear. But one reasonable worry – shared by Syrians and others in the region – is that once such weapons-manufacturing skills become widespread in a society, these weapons can continue to appear for generations, and can be used in ways beyond their initial intended purpose. Arms production, like arms distribution, can be a slippery and very dangerous slope.

Next we’ll look at an example of improvised weapons used by loyalists, who, as they lose ground and standing, seem to have begun putting their workshops to martial service, too.

Left: Locally made explosive shells, the work of tradesmen in Tal Rifaat. Each is essentially a pipe bomb designed to be fired like a projectile, with a crude point-detonating fuze in the nose. Right: A 62-millimeter towed howitzer, sketched out and then assembled in Tal Rifaat by Syrians seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

There are many indicators of the stubborn determination and evolving organization of the fighting groups in Syria seeking to unseat President Bashar al-Assad. One of them is this: the development of local arms-producing industries in Syrian cities and the countryside. In a war in which the antigovernment fighters have sought outside support and been disappointed by what has been offered, especially from the West, the society that produced the fighters has also undertaken the production of matériel for guerrilla war, a social project of such a scale that it has contributed to the armed opposition’s momentum and confidence this year. The progression is both intriguing and relevant to those seeking to understand the Free Syrian Army, as the loosely organized antigovernment fighters are called. This is not just for the view that local production provides of latter-day warfare with do-it-yourself arms. It offers insights into something else — the social forces within an uprising that is reordering the Middle East.

At War will highlight samples of the work of arms-producing tradesmen in Tal Rifaat, a small city on the agricultural plain north of Aleppo, doing so both in the interest of illuminating the origins and choices of makeshift weapons and to underline the meaning, promises and risks inherent in a such a collective project. I gained access to several tradesmen and different categories of weapons. Beginning today, At War will examine the industry’s evolution and look at two locally made items, and will continue in the next installment with more weapons and a set of conclusions about what they mean.

At first, the rebels’ improvised weapons assumed forms well established in the Middle East: Molotov cocktails and roadside bombs. These weapons were seen as the government crackdown intensified last year, but initially had little effect against the Syrian Army and security forces. With time these two types of homegrown weapons served to punish the Syrian armored columns that for months had roamed the roads unchallenged; by this spring, the rebels’ roadside bombs had become so prevalent and effective that they had forced the Syrian Army to all but cease operating in entire stretches of its own country, especially along the country’s northern border. These weapons changed the nature and direction of the war.

As bombs made the roads impassable (or at least not passable without a draining and grisly price), the Syrian military recalibrated tactically, sending helicopters and eventually jets to attack where its ground troops no longer ventured. As the government escalated, the rebels and their supporters were not idle. They were busy expanding their arms-shop handiwork. A few writers have taken note. Eliot Higgins, the man behind the busy Brown Moses Blog, wrote an early summary on Foreign Policy magazine’s Web site, in which he identified trends (including the appearance of gun trucks) and a few unusual items (like a locally made flame-thrower) and noted, accurately, that until that point “DIY weapons have been less of a feature in Syria than in the Libyan civil war.”

At War and The New York Times covered closely the arms manufacturing associated with Libya’s uprising. While it is indisputably true that antigovernment fighters in Libya were faster and more prolific in rolling out gun trucks and garage-grade rocket launchers, this was partly the case because these fighters, aided by NATO air cover, held ground and captured heavy machine guns and ground-to-ground rockets sooner in their war, and were able to organize workshops to repurpose captured weapons with less risk. There is another factor, too: In Syria, the workshops and the men behind them spent much of their early time learning a lethal craft that Libyans pursued at a comparatively tiny scale: bomb-making. By this summer, the Syrian trade in brewing crude explosives and wiring circuits that can be detonated remotely had matured into something formidable. Design energy and labor were freed for other work. Mr. Higgins was looking in the right place — toward the development of more workshop-made arms.

Late last month, The Times made a first effort to describe several means by which Syrian fighting groups are obtaining arms, including via smuggling and organic manufacture. This complemented a previous look at pricing for standard infantry arms, which helped explain why the underground manufacturing effort had taken root: steep prices for weapons, and intense demand, drove a hunt to find as many sources as possible.

Space limits prevented us from sharing many details. (The picture desk did manage to post an excellent slide show.) This pair of posts will examine more closely four types of weapons. These include a mounted 14.5-millimeter machine gun, a small towed howitzer made entirely by local metalworkers, a homemade mortar and an assortment of ground-to-ground rockets.

The machine-gun mount appeared to borrow heavily from two non-martial implements in common local use – a satellite-dish stand and a disc brake for a motorcycle — to field a captured weapon in an useful way. The other three systems, just like the rebels’ roadside and truck bombs, were manufactured almost entirely from scratch, with only a few components from traditional munitions or explosives plants.

To Mount a Machine Gun: Borrow From What’s Nearby

Begin by looking at the photograph above. It shows a scene common to many recent wars: a pickup truck in service as a mobile machine-gun platform, with the machine gunner (in this case, standing within a pair of black Chuckie-T high-tops) in back, behind a 14.5-millimeter machine gun on a makeshift mount. That man is a defector from the Syrian Army, in which he worked with, among other things, machine guns. All normal so far. Now look more closely. The machine-gun mount has unusual features, evident below.

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A 14.5-millimeter machine gun, mounted.Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

Is that a bicycle handle with handbrakes attached to the weapon’s back end, with cables reaching to the brake? Almost. It’s actually a disc brake for a motorcycle, with hand levers for applying the pads to the disc. As adaptations go, this one is both novel and makes good sense. Why would a machine gun need a motorcycle brake, especially when carried around the countryside on a pickup truck that has brakes of its own? The answer has nothing to do with slowing a vehicle’s movement. Used in the manner shown above, the repurposed brake serves to control and ultimately arrest the vertical motion of the machine gun, allowing the operator to release the handbrake to adjust the weapon’s elevation and then, when on target, to squeeze the brake and hold the weapon steady for firing. Below is a better view of the pads and disc.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

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The disc brake assembly used to adjust and lock the gun's direction.Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

Now look back at the base of the machine gun, at the round metal endplate. Midway between the handgrips, on the top of the machine gun, you will spot an L-shaped metal strip. At the top of that strip, below, you’ll see someone has drilled a small hole into its top. That hole is threaded. We’ve highlighted it in red to help it stand out.

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Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

What is its purpose? Only in the digital age would you guess it. The hole has been tapped to receive a standard tripod mount for a digital camera, affixed so that the lens points down the barrel’s length. Thus installed, the camera is then put on video mode, and the lens zoomed out to the horizon. The camera’s LCD screen then serves as a long-range sight — a live video feed allowing the man firing the weapon to observe the path of the tracers relative to an aircraft or distant vehicle much more closely than he otherwise would.

The mount has other features as well – including a sheet-metal feed box on its left side, to hold the weapon’s belted ammunition. But the tubular pedestal is more interesting. For a long time, many of us had wondered how rebels in recent wars had so quickly designed such pedestals, especially in forms that appear to work quite well. One possible answer came to mind when Bryan Denton and I were atop a building in Aleppo, watching Syrian Air Force helicopters and an L-39 attack jet during a series of rocket runs. We were crouched low on the roof in a neighborhood where many buildings were covered in thickets of satellite dishes. Each dish was mounted on a metal stand similar to those commonly holding vehicle-mounted machine guns. This same pedestal, we realized, was a high-demand part of the local metalworkers’ craft. It is a small step from an adjustable satellite dish mount to a mount in which a shooter can traverse and elevate a machine gun while standing in a pickup bed. This is one possible root of this practice.

So how does the entire mount come together? One afternoon last month, the commander of the unit in current possession of this machine gun, Abdul Hakim Yasin, displayed a video file that clearly showed the rounds from this same machine gun striking a Syrian Air Force Mi-8 or Mi-17 helicopter at long range. These impacts would not have been seen otherwise.

The aircraft survived the shooting, though it fled. On one level, the video of this shooting raised obvious questions about how much more damage has been inflicted in Syria’a air force than is known. On another, the entire apparatus for putting into action a captured machine gun underscores an important point: that the antigovernment fighters’ makeshift arms industry has gone well beyond merely making do. It has found ways to marry powerful weapons and locally made or recycled devices, and to field weapons that can influence a complex fight against a conventionally well-equipped foe.

How this happened will set up a larger point, after we examine the other weapons.

Workshop-Grade Artillery

Photo

Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

The next weapon system worth examining was briefly covered in The Times. Dubbed by those who made it as “Dadool,” Syrian slang for an overweight, energetic man, it is a 62-millimeter towed howitzer, shown above.

The weapon itself commands attention, and it was obviously the result of a fairly extended design process. The photograph below shows the discarded remains of one prototype – evidence that arms like this are not spontaneous creations. There is an extended process behind them.

Photo

Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

The current version of the weapon is loaded through its breech, and fires locally made projectiles though a 65-inch-long barrel. Each projectile is roughly the size of a 16-ounce beverage bottle, and has been packed with locally made explosives. As eye-catching as the howitzer is, these shells are more important. They speak to the broader phenomenon required to field such a system. And that is what this is – a full system, a weapon and its associated ammunition, assembled by a collective of tradesmen with different skills.

Photo

Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

The shells, several of which are shown above, work by a multistep process. Each is built around two sections of pipe, joined by threaded couplings that match snugly to the interior diameter the howitzer’s barrel. Inside each pipe is an explosive fill, ideally an insensitive explosive that can handle jarring and swings in temperature. (Badr, the man who made Dadool, said different explosives had been tried inside the shell; the version as of August was urea-based.)

At the forward end of the projectile, metal workers have designed and affixed a cast aluminum fuze body, which is topped with a hollow threaded bolt with a crude striker assembly. This hollowed-out bolt holds a sensitive explosive, placed to initiate the larger volume of explosives in the pipe when the projectile makes contact with a solid object after being fired.

Another feature is worth pointing to: Each coupling has been scored by a grinder or similar tool. The resulting grooves are intended to impart spin on the projectile as it travels down the barrel, which is not rifled. The spin is meant to stabilize the projectile in flight, preventing yaw, drift or even tumbling. This design touch suggests that the shells’ manufacturers possess a more than rudimentary understanding of ballistics, although whether it actually works is anyone’s guess.

Three samples of entire projectiles, absent their striker assemblies, can be seen below, left. At right is the striker.

Photo

Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

So how does it all work? To fire these rounds, each projectile is seated on an open-ended metal cylinder that fits within the howitzer’s breech. This contains propellant removed from shotgun shells, one by one, to fill the empty space. At the opposing end of each cylinder, which is closed, workers have drilled a narrow hole into which a .22-caliber blank cartridge, of the sort used in a starter pistol at a track meet, is inserted. This is a clever: a blank cartridge, not typically of use in wartime, serving as a primer for an explosive shell. You can see an example below and to the right, in the image of the blank atop the open-ended pipe that holds the shotgun propellant, and then the same cartridge inserted, below.

Photo

Credit C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

Once a shell has been slipped into the breech and the heavy steel plate has been slid into place behind it, rotated a few degrees and bolted down tight, the operator is ready to fire Dadool. This is done by pulling a 20-meter-long lanyard that releases a spring-loaded firing pin. The pin strikes the base of the blank cartridge, which flashes and ignites the propellant. The rest happens in the same split second: the propellant’s almost instantaneous burn results in a rapid gas expansion that blasts the projectile down and out the barrel, toward to its intended target.

Now, let’s talk about limits, because a weapon like this has many. For all of the work that went into developing such a weapon, it is not a system that can be fired quickly. Reload times would run into minutes. And as of last month, Dadool in tests had a short range: perhaps two kilometers, according to the man who made it, Badr. What this means is that in a head-to-head fight against an army unit with a reasonably proficient mortar crew, Dadool and its operators would be vulnerable, the more so when you consider the intensity of the muzzle flash visible in the video.

Another detail is worth pulling out: Badr’s decision to use a 20-meter-long lanyard. Here an unbendable fact remains: weapons of this sort are part of a very dangerous means of waging war. The length of that lanyard tells you that those who designed this weapon want those who use it to be far away from the weapon when it is fired. The reasons for such precautions are self-evident. The pipe that forms Dadool’s barrel might not be able to withstand the heat or pressure of firing, and could rupture. And this pipe will likely only get weaker over time, in part due to the barrel erosion you’d expect from using plumbing-grade pipe in this way.

The primitive point-detonating fuze in each projectile’s nose presents yet another concern. Safety features in workshop-grade weapons can be nonexistent, and the nature of this fuze’s design could make it prone to mishap when undergoing the rapid acceleration associated with being fired, the jolt of which could force the striker to slip backward and initiate the explosive train. That could rupture Dadool’s barrel, too – even more dangerously. A 20-meter-long lanyard is a sound idea. Thirty meters might be even better.

Now that you have a sense of some of the weapons, here comes that bucket of cold water. The most important elements of the production of machine-gun turrets and indirect-fire arms are not the turrets or the improvised artillery. The most important element is the underlying phenomenon and what it suggests about Syria today. At War will take that up in more detail in the next post.

Bryan Denton for The New York TimesRebel fighters prepared meals for for their group at their base in a seized residential compound in Tal Rifaat.

Sometimes when working in the field you make the mistake of looking right past a story. There — right there — is an element of your subject, squarely in front of you, all but screaming, and you don’t hear it.

That almost happened in Syria.

The photo above, made by Bryan Denton while we were living with an antigovernment fighting group that calls itself the Lions of Tawhid, offers a fine example.

Bryan and I had been assigned to deepen our understanding of the Free Syrian Army, the name given to the myriad fighting units in Syria that are locked in battle with Syria’s military and together seek the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.

To do this, we lived with the fighters, traveled with the fighters and queried the fighters at length, almost round the clock. We sought answers to the questions any researcher might have about how a guerrilla force came into existence, how it is led and organized, how it fights, how it acquires its equipment and what motivates each member. The Free Syrian Army is a young rebel movement, a product in part of the government crackdown last year. Many of us are only beginning to assemble the collective understanding of what has become a sprawling armed movement that is now a crucible shaping a generation of Syrian men who will influence Middle Eastern society and politics for generations ahead, long after the Assad government is no more.

But our querying, if focused too narrowly, risked limiting what we might understand. This is because guerrilla movements, and their prospects, are molded not only from within. External factors – like their enemies, or their sponsors, or their models – also give them shape. And environmental factors can matter, too.

This is where Bryan’s photo comes in. What do you see? Three young fighters in their armory, preparing to break the Ramadan fast. But what of those bowls of fruit in the foreground? Certainly they are colorful elements, and they elevate the image in photographic ways.

But they also convey information that matters. Don’t think of them as merely a sublime touch, or a way to freshen an otherwise familiar scene. They are trying to tell us something more, namely, that this movement has good food.

And there it is: the story we have not read yet on the Syrian war, but heard many passing comments on as we traveled Aleppo Province. It is a story, in a word, of rain.

To succeed, guerrilla forces and insurgencies need to meet many conditions. You all know the list of factors that can determine a combat force’s prospects and course: its leadership, its training, its equipment, its choice of tactics, the competence and fighting styles of its foes, its moral position, its finances, its degree of external support, the terrain it operates on, the demographics and inclinations of the populations it lives among, and on and on. But in Syria, on several occasions, we heard people speak of something else: rain.

Last winter and this spring, as the uprising was gathering momentum and the government crackdown was becoming larger and more brutal, the northern Syrian countryside received a generous amount of snow and rainfall, many people told us.

National Climatic Data CenterPrecipitation in inches from a weather monitoring station at the Aleppo International Airport. The data shows 15 precipitation events recorded at the station from October 2011 to June 2012.

But no matter the precise data, one thing was clear. Whether it is a factor of the local water table or of recent precipitation, or both, Syria, in spite of the war, has been enjoying an abundant harvest of many crops. For a country under such stress, this is a vital bit of information, and, for Syria’s people, a blessing.

One night we were with many Syrian men as they broke fast at a grain mill, where the supervisors told us that the crop this year had been excellent. And everywhere we looked we saw evidence of banner crops — large potatoes coming from the soil, abundant tomatoes and red peppers, extraordinary melons and an assortment of fruit: figs, plums, peaches and more. It is likely that on average, crop yields this year could be down. But this might be a result of a labor shortage, due to so many people’s fleeing, more than to conditions of the 2012 the growing season. Certainly there was enough food for the Free Syrian Army units we observed. In the evening, when the fighters sat down to meals, they feasted on locally grown crops.

Revolutions need many things, but one element is essential: food. And in Syria in 2012, food was something the fighters had. Not just food, but extraordinary fresh food. We heard it many times: “We thank God for rain.”

Wars are carried along by many currents. We would be remiss if we missed this one, evident in Bryan’s photo, above. Within the opposition, some men dared to think that even rain was on their side, and they could point to the crops as proof.

Facebook.comA complete SA-7 system shown in a screen grab from the Facebook profile of Obaida Elwani.

For the first time since the conflict in Syria began last year, an activist opposed to President Bashar al-Assad has publicly presented possible evidence that the antigovernment forces have obtained a heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile.

Caveats are in order, because it is impossible to tell from the Facebook page when and where the image was made. The image has been composed too tightly to confirm that it was shot in Aleppo, and the date is not clear. But if it is legitimate, it lends weight to a report last week by Richard Engel of NBC News about the alleged transfer over the Turkish border of nearly two dozen shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels.

Whether the SA-7 in the photograph is functional, or how effective an SA-7 would be against Syrian military aircraft, is also unknown. The SA-7 is an old system; its heat-seeking head can be thwarted by countermeasures on many modern military aircraft. And fighters planning to use the system effectively would need training, including on how to select the best angles for attacking aircraft; it is not possible to tell from this image whether the system is in even reasonably competent hands. That said, Syria’s military helicopters, judging from the abundant footage of their activities in recent weeks, could be vulnerable to such weapons – even to old variants like the SA-7, which would also reasonably be expected to change Syrian pilots’ perceptions of the risks of sorties into areas where rebels with SA-7s are present.

In other words, this is potentially a development worth following as the battle for Aleppo grinds on.

Earlier this week, as fighting in Syria raged, a pair of videos circulated online that appeared to show something new: Syrian opposition fighters in possession of at least one heat-seeking, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile.

The proliferation of such weapons, known in the popular imagination as weapons of the Stinger class, is one of the enduring worries in counterterrorism and aviation-security circles, and one of this blog’s recurring themes. (For background on these weapons and the concerns related to their wide distribution during and after the war in Libya, click here)

There has long been expectation that such weapons would turn up in the conflict in Syria, and when they did, it would be news.

So, full stop. What do the videos show, and what might it all mean?

Let’s back up and walk through things methodically. The contest for Syria between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and the armed opposition seeking his ouster presents a daily stream of amateur videos of the violence and the activities related to it, making this a conflict like almost no other to try to cover thoroughly and thoughtfully. (The New York Times’ Watching Syria video feature attempts to put such videos into context.)

That said, analyzing elements of a conflict, through video of often unknown provenance, presents researchers and journalists with particular challenges. Many of these videos are authentic and seem to present honestly generated glimpses of the conflict. But a few are not authentic or present misleading or deceitful scenes, like this one of supposed Syrian opposition fighters, who actually are bearing toy guns.

For the purposes of our journalism, any time we try to assess video from a military analysis or arms-trade point of view (and we are typically asked to assess many videos each day), we do so through at least a three-step process.

First, we try to determine if the footage is actually from Syria and related to the conflict. This can be difficult in some cases; when uncertainty remains, we set the video aside.

Second, we try to identify what is shown in the video, which can be hard, too, and also often causes us to pause.

Last, if a video passes the first two rounds, we ask ourselves what it all means.

In the case of the videos showing missiles in question, step one was easy.

The first video, above, shows a well-known fighting group that operates in Homs and Rastan posing in formation with a typical mix of light-infantry arms. This particular rebel group has had a combat record since last September, according to Joseph Holliday, an analyst covering the conflict and studying the opposition forces for the Institute of the Study of War in Washington. Mr. Holliday further noted that the video of what he called “this absolutely legitimate unit” included footage of its commander, Ibrahim Ayub, as well. This gives the video an authentic, sanctioned feel.

Step two was a cinch, too. At about 39 seconds into the first video, the camera pans past a man in blue pants who is holding components of an SA-7 Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems, or Manpads.

This weapon is a widely distributed portable antiaircraft system designed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s and circulated through many countries and conflicts in the decades after, including via knockoff production outside of Russia. It is a common system, if rather dated, that poses marginal threats to modern military aircraft with modern countermeasures, but is a potential menace to civilian aircraft.

A second video, above, of the same fighting group, shows another man with a similar set of SA-7 components; it is not easy to determine from the video alone whether these are two different sets of components or the same components being held by a different anti-Assad fighter.

What can be said, however, is that the “weapon looks like a first-generation SA-7 Manpads or a foreign variant,” wrote Matthew Schroeder, an analyst covering missile proliferation for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. Mr. Schroeder added that “a more definitive assessment of the missile, including the model, age and country of manufacture, would require footage of the markings on the launch tube.” This means that it is not possible from the video and the rest of the information available about such missiles in Syria to be sure who manufactured these components, and when, and what government possessed them last.

But it does mean that the videos make it through step one (do we believe it is authentic?) and step two (what does it show?). And that leads to step three: what might it all mean?

First, and more important, let’s reach for our bucket of cold water, because the video does not establish that the anti-Assad forces possess functional shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles. If you were a Syrian air force Mi-24 attack helicopter pilot, and you had a good eye for weapons, you would have reason to be worried by these pictures, but not especially worried. Why? Because the weapon system shown in both videos is incomplete.

A properly functioning SA-7 requires three components – a missile tube, a battery unit and a grip stock. The grip stock, which holds the trigger, is necessary for the weapon to fire the missile. The photo below shows a Libyan anti-Qaddafi fighter last year, with a complete SA-7 system, including grip stock.

C.J. Chivers/The New York TimesA rebel in Libya holding a complete SA-7 system.

But both recent videos from the Rastan fighters show a missile tube with a battery, but do not show a grip stock. This means that the weapon cannot be fired as designed and probably cannot be fired at all, at least not as seen in these videos. (It remains possible that the fighters have a grip stock but for some reason have not displayed it for the cameras.)

All that these videos allow a careful analyst to say is that it now credibly appears that one fighting group in Syria is two-thirds of the way toward having a complete, if dated, heat-seeking antiaircraft weapon. But as shown thus far, this weapon has no more range than the men holding it could throw it. It is less a danger to aircraft than an intriguing and suggestive movie prop. (Again: assuming there is no grip stock waiting off-camera.)

Second, these video clips beg questions about where each SA-7 tube and battery came from. Many commentators have suggested that loose SA-7’s from Libya might have made their way to Syria. That would certainly seem a valid theory, and would be consistent with the workings of the black market arms trade – if prices for Manpads are high in and near Syria, then Manpads out of state control elsewhere could reasonably be expected to turn up.

In this case, the paint scheme or markings on the face of the battery in Syria do not resemble the common paint scheme or markings on the face of the many SA-7 batteries seen in Libya, though that is hardly definitive proof. (Back to what Mr. Schroeder said: the videos do not offer enough detail to say many important things).

Still, another theory is worth putting on the table. Syria was a longtime importer of Soviet and post-Soviet weaponry, including Manpads. Precise numbers are publicly unknown, but Syria, under the Assad family’s long reign, is thought to have imported thousands of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, including SA-7s along with more modern SA-14 and SA-18 systems, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The available data is limited and does not distinguish between complete systems (battery, tube and grip stock) and a count of just the missiles themselves. But the information manages to establish, as was the case in Libya, that the unraveling of the government forces in Syria could result in many very dangerous military-grade weapons, including man-portable heat-seeking missiles, leaving secure storage and ending up in the grips of citizens, and eventually finding their way to black markets.

Like the worries over the fate of the Assad chemical-weapons stocks, this is reason to worry about what might follow as the Assad military faces more pressure in a conflict that has seen the momentum shift.

Lolo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFighters from the Free Syrian Army bought rifle and machine gun cartridges from a weapons seller in Idlib Province in July.

ISLAHIYE, Turkey — Abu Hamed, a former Syrian Army captain who is now a guerrilla commander fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, sat cross-legged in a tent in a refugee camp this week, echoing one of the Syrian opposition’s most common complaints. “We need weapons,” he said. “All kinds of weapons.”

And then, as the conversation deepened and tea flowed, he spoke of prices. Mr. Hamed leads a battalion near Aleppo. The demand for weapons on his turf is so high, and supplies are so short, he said, that he has had to pay more than $4 for a single rifle or machine-gun cartridge. A Kalashnikov assault rifle, he said, costs $2,000 or more.

In the history of conflict, these are high prices, and they suggest many things worth exploring. So At War will break this post into two parts. First, a summary of the data and what it might mean. And then, for readers who like multimedia, an exercise on how it all translates to violence and, in the rebels’ hopes, to the cost, literally, of tactical success.

We’ll begin with the data. In informal surveys in the past week, taken during interviews with fighters and commanders near Turkey’s border with Syria, the price range for infantry arms and ammunition suggested an intense demand. When compared to years of price data, collected for coverage in The New York Times or as research for The Gun, my social history of assault rifle proliferation, these prices were near the upper range. Such demand exists in context, signaling that even after the conflict escalated in recent months, and the armed opposition’s ranks grew, there remain many men in Syria seeking military arms. If history is a guide, they will find them. Gray- and black-market dealers are unlikely to miss out on this party, and anti-Assad fighters can reasonably be expected to capture more arms from defeated Syrian military and paramilitary units, and in turn put more men under arms. Taken together, and if one believes in arms-price horoscopes, the arms prices collected suggested that — barring a surprise, like the swift fall of the Assad government and the acceptance of defeat by its army and Alawite supporters — the number of military arms in the public’s hands can be expected to keep growing.

What did the data say, specifically? Mr. Hamed’s ammunition price was higher than the price data shared by nearly a dozen commanders and other fighters; the typical price quote from the others was $2 per rifle round. But his other data was consistent with the statements of the rest, including commanders from Idlib and Hama, many of whom gathered last Friday in Antakya to vent frustration with the state of arms supply.

Lolo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA fighter from the rebel Free Syrian Army checked Kalashnikov rifles before buying them from a weapons seller in Idlib Province in July.

According to these men, Kalashnikovs now cost $1,000 to more than $2,000 (depending on condition), full RPG-7 systems (a reusable launcher with two or three high-explosive antitank rounds) cost more than $2,000, and each replacement grenade costs $500. PK machine guns, another common firearm, cost $6,000 to $7,000. No modern infantry rifle is available for less than $900. Some cost several times that. Thus, arming three riflemen, a machine gunner and a man with a rocket-propelled grenade could easily cost a commander more than $10,000 — not counting ammunition.

There were curiosities in the mix, and these drove costs even higher. The American-designed M-16 has been present in Syria’s internal war, most often seen with a telescopic sight, as below. And the prices were very high – from $5,000 to $7,000 per rifle, with scope. The consistent association of scopes on these rifles suggests that the higher-velocity and flatter-shooting trajectory of the M-16 line, and its general reputation for better accuracy than the Kalashnikov, might mean they are seeing limited use as sniper rifles. (At War uses that ever-slippery word “sniper” generously; for further discussion of its meaning here, read this post and its companion from the current Afghan war.) But again, context matters. The M-16 has not been a primary arm, the fighters said. Mr. Hamed openly dismissed its value – not because of its performance but because of an unreliable ammunition supply. “We had M-16s but we only had 100 bullets for them,” he said, smiling ruefully. “So the M-16 became useless. We are using it as a stick.”

Robert King/PolarisA member of the rebel Free Syrian Army with an American-designed M-16 with optical scope in Homs, Syria.

The Dragunov line of semiautomatic sniper rifles, shown below, is apparently in larger circulation. And fighters said they liked them for reasons related to — you guessed it — supply: the ammunition is compatible with that of the PK machine guns. But these rifles, fighters said, have also been hard to obtain, reflected in what they said they had paid for them — $1,500 to $5,000 each. (Future arms researchers be warned: some fighters did not know this weapon by its internationally recognized names, the SVD or Dragunov. Only when shown sketches of the rifle did they light up. “Ahh, Brezhnev!” one said.)

ReutersA Free Syrian Army fighter practiced using a Dragunov semiautomatic sniper rifle during training exercises in the countryside outside of Homs in June.

Last year, in Libya, arms researchers watched the swift arc from arms scarcity to oversupply among the opposition forces. From late winter into early summer, weapons were in short enough supply that many Libyan men went to battle without them, ready to pick up the weapon of a fallen fighter, while hoping to capture the weapons of slain Qaddafi troops. At that time, Kalashnikovs could cost $2,000 or more, just as they do for Syrian fighters now. By last fall, after the struggle for the country ebbed, many fighters possessed several rifles, along with machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades. Prices were plummeting, with reports of Kalashnikovs for sale at less than $500. Post-Qaddafi Libya, which for months had inhaled weapons, had become a black-market exporter, with all manner of arms being reported traveling out.

With this in mind, one Syrian rebel commander from Idlib, after the meeting last Friday, drove with journalists from The New York Times to a house he and a commander from Hama share with an ever-changing collection of fighters. His name was Abu Hamza, and he was a former major in the Syrian army. Abu Hamza wanted more weapons. But he said he worried where this was headed – toward the possibility of chaos. “After the war,” he said, “we have to collect these weapons.”

Abu Hamza was confident about the prospects for the uprising; there is no question, he said, that Mr. Assad will fall. But he worried about the effects of these weapons on post-conflict Syria. “We have been watching,” he said, “and we do not want Syria to be like Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya.”

The Price of a Firefight

Now that you have a sense of prices, and an understanding of the long-range worries as a population arms itself, put these prices into a more immediate context. We’ll do that via a straightforward yet maddeningly difficult exercise. If you have a few minutes, sit to watch a few of the uncountable videos made in firefights in Syria this year.

This exercise gets progressively harder. When you watch, try to count each bullet fired by the anti-Assad fighters, and try to identify and count the weapons in the hands of the same men. There is no time limit. You can watch each video as many times as you wish. Have paper and pencil ready, and add up the cost of what you see and hear.

Then the prices listed in this post will have a fuller feel, the more so because these videos are only a few minutes long, a tiny sample from a sprawling and potentially long-running war. And the remarks of one fighter will ring true. “People are selling their cars or even houses to raise money to help the fighters,” the fighter said. “But you can sell your house, and it might be enough for a battalion to have one or two hours of big fighting.”

This is another example of the cost of war, literally, in this case waged by a population that has put itself, with little international help, under arms.

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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